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Alienation in Karl Marx’s early writing

Young Marx.

By Daniel Lopez

October 15, 2013 -- Links international
Journal of Socialist Renewal -- As Karl Korsh noted in Marxism and
Philosophy, the
philosophical foundation of Marx’s works has often been neglected. The Second
International had, in Korsch’s view, pushed aside philosophy as an ideology,
preferring “science”. This, he charged, tended to reduce Marxism to a
positivistic sociology, and in so doing, it internalised and replicated the theoretical
logic of capitalism.[1]In place of this, Korsch called for a
revitalisation of Marxism that would view philosophy not simply as false
consciousness but as a necessary part of the social totality.[2]

Following Marx, we
should understand that philosophy could be, at best, its own period
comprehended in thought, and that “philosophy cannot be abolished without being
realised”.[3] Korsh was not alone in
this. Georg Lukács’ major work, History and Class Consciousness, appeared almost simultaneously. Lukács,
too, sought to lead a renewal of Marxism via a return to its philosophical
roots, specifically in Hegel.[4] Unknown to them at the
time, there was a greater basis for this in Marx’s writing than they could have
imagined. In 1927, Marx’s The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
was released; this was followed in 1932 by The German Ideology. These
two texts joined other works by Marx, including The Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish Question (1843), The
Holy Family (1845, co-authored with Engels), Theses on Feuerbach
(1845) and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Together, these illustrate
a vast and penetrating critical engagement with Hegelian philosophy.

This essay will engage
with this body of work in order to shed light on Marx’s early period and
specifically, the concept of alienation.[5] The central contention
here is that alienation is vital to the ontological bedrock of Marx’s early viewpoint.
This will help to elucidate a number of related issues. Specifically, his
concept of labour as species-being, his argument that material reality is
always formed by and through social relations and his application of alienation
to the critique of philosophy and history will be explored. In order to do this,
this essay will be divided into four subsections which deal with the concept of
alienation as Marx developed it. It will begin with his Hegelian inheritance
and will then move to his political critique of Hegel. Following the
development of Marx’s thought, the essay will discuss the economic production
of alienation. Marx’s theory of the overcoming of alienation will then be considered,
with reference to the Young Hegelian movement, against which he formulated his
views. This will necessitate a short discussion of alienation in history and
Marx’s theory of revolution. It is hoped that out of this, an understanding of
Marx’s early period will be reached that emphasises his radical humanism and
his basic affinity with thinkers like Korsh, Lukács and Rubin. Finally, this
essay seeks to present a Marx who is simultaneously deeply indebted to and
critical of Hegel.

Marx’s
Hegelian roots

Alienation is a theme fundamental
to Hegel’s thought. To give an in-depth account of this would be a vast
undertaking. This essay will therefore limit itself to one clear example – the
emergence of Reason out of Self-Consciousness in Section B of The
Phenomenology of Spirit.[6] In Section A, Hegelgives an account of the emergence of consciousness
– always the “protagonist” in ThePhenomenology – from the figure
of the Understanding.[7] In its first appearance,
however, Consciousness does not exist as its Concept, or in its fully
self-aware, self-reflexive form. Consciousness is not yet conscious of its own
movement: it is not the Concept “for itself”, it is only implicitly this
Concept “in itself”. In other words, Consciousness makes its first appearance
in a pre-rational, estranged form. It does not know itself and has not mastered
itself, opening the way to self-reflexive Reason. Crucially, it appears divided
from its object (and in this, from itself). Therefore:

Consciousness, as
self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is the immediate
object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however, for self-consciousness has the
character of a negative; and
the second, viz. itself, which
is the true essence, and is
present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object. In this
sphere, self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which the
antithesis is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit
for it.[8]

This is to say,
consciousness may only take possession of itself – to become for itself – by
appropriating its object, the object of sense-certainty. The first stage in
this journey is the production of Life. Even Hegel concedes that Consciousness
gets hungry and must reproduce. Hence, Consciousness is first produced via the
mediation of Desire. In its attempts to satisfy desire, Consciousness meets another
Consciousness, or the We. In this encounter, Consciousness becomes aware of
itself as more than a singular I, but one that is always conditioned by Others.[9] This gives rise to the
famous dialectic of lordship and bondage.[10] In this, the master is
initially assumed to be in possession of Consciousness for itself. Yet, he only
gains his independence via the mediation of the bondsman whose labour satiates
his desire. Hence the lord is dependent, whereas the bondsman is capable of
mediating desire and obtaining real independence and mastery over the
satisfaction of life’s needs and objective being.[11] The achievement of this
stage is effectively to leave the world of subsistence behind; consciousness is
now self-consciousness and may appropriate its spiritual world.

Despite
self-consciousness having won independence, it is still subject to vast
Otherness that appears as hostile to self-consciousness. Therefore it must
traverse three attitudes towards the Other. These are Stoicism, Scepticism and
the Unhappy Consciousness. In the first two of these stages, Consciousness
attempts to convince itself of the goodness and truth of its subjugation. In
the second stage, Consciousness attempts to deny the Other. In the third,
Consciousness is forced to recognise and traverse its unequal relationship with
the Other, which is now termed “the Unchangeable”. It is important to note that
this section is a discussion of the evolution of human thought in the Middle Ages,
via religious thinking. The Unchangeable is, of course, God. This aside,
Consciousness proceeds in a series of stages in its struggle to regain the
Unchangeable as part of itself, to gain autonomy with respect to its own
product. These stages need not be detailed exactly; suffice it to say,
consciousness recognises both a moment of itself in the individuation of the
Unchangeable (i.e., Jesus) and that the Unchangeable must operate via
individuals (i.e. divine providence). This faith in the providence of the
Unchangeable pushes Consciousness to surrender itself apparently to the
Unchangeable; as the satisfaction of desire is attributed to the Unchangeable,
thanks are given for all satisfaction, which is seen as a gift. Work, too, is
dedicated to the Unchangeable.[12] Yet, Hegel points out, in
this apparent renunciation, there is in actual fact an extreme affirmation of
individuality: “Consciousness feels itself therein as this particular
individual, and does not let itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation,
for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself”.[13] Consciousness, knowing
this in its heart, turns further against itself, and becomes more abject:

Its
actual doing thus becomes a doing of nothing, its enjoyment a feeling of its
wretchedness … Consciousness is aware of itself as this actual individual
in the animal functions. These are no longer performed naturally and without
embarrassment, as matters trifling in themselves … instead, since it is in them
that the enemy reveals himself in his characteristic shape, they are rather the
object of serious endeavour, and become precisely matters of the utmost
importance. This enemy, however, renews himself in his defeat, and
consciousness, in fixing its attention on him, far from freeing itself from
him, really remains ever in contact with him, and for ever sees itself as
defiled; [consciousness] is the merest particular, we have here only a
personality confined to its own self and its own petty actions, a personality brooding
over itself, as wretched as it is impoverished.[14]

This descent into shame and
self-negation can easily be read as a metaphor for Catholicism. Yet, as with
all such negation, in Hegel, there is a potential for a passage to a higher
stage in its depths. Via this alienation, Consciousness prostrates its will
utterly to the Unchanging, (via the mediation of a priest or minister). In so
doing, it ceases to be for itself and obtains an objective existence;
consciousness overcomes particularity and obtains a universal character. So,
Hegel finishes the section, writing:

But for itself
[consciousness], action and its own actual doing remain pitiable, its enjoyment
remains pain, and the overcoming of these in a positive sense remains a beyond.
But in this object, in which it finds that its own action and being, as being
of this particularconsciousness, are being and action in
themselves, there has arisen for consciousness the idea of Reason,
of that certainty that, in this particular individuality it has being
absolutely in itself, or is all reality.[15]

This is a quintessential
illustration of the overcoming the – aufhebung – of alienation in the
Hegelian sense. It is clear that the historical referent here is the emergence
of the first comprehensive, monistic rationalism out of religious
consciousness, namely in the form of Spinoza’s philosophy. Citing this
dialectic also foreshadows common ground and sharp divergences between Marx and
Hegel. Marx acknowledged the considerable common ground in the final section of
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 when he wrote: “The
outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phänomenologie and of its final
outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is
thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process,
conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as
transcendence of this alienation …”[16] Yet in the same space,
Marx raises what he sees as Hegel’s greatest error. This deserves to be quoted
at length as it forms the basis of Marx’s entire critique of Hegel. Moreover,
it foreshadows themes that will appear below:

There
is a double error in Hegel … When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are
understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only
happens in their form as thoughts ... They are thought-entities, and therefore
merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The
whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract
thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with
their presumption of reality. The philosopher – who is himself an abstract form
of estranged man – takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The
whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction
of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of
abstract (i.e., absolute) thought – of logical, speculative thought. The
estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of the transcendence of
this alienation is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness
and self-consciousness, of object and subject – that is to say, it is the
opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness
within thought itself. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions
are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which
alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane
oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself
inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself
in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes
the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded.[17]

We can see clearly here that where Hegel takes Spirit, via
Consciousness, to be the creator its entire world, Marx takes humanity – as
will become clear below, via labour – as the creator of its world. In Hegel,
Spirit returns to itself through an essentially philosophical journey. Marx
rejects this teleology as speculative, arguing that it is effectively a
dialectical-rationalist version of theism.[18]
He replaces Hegel’s subject – Spirit – with a humanity that can construct
itself as the master of its world by overcoming its state of debasement and
alienation. Therefore, Marx does not posit the primary difference between
himself and Hegel as one of idealism vs. materialism, but of theism vs.
humanism. Finally, there are other themes raised here, such as Marx’s critique
of philosophy as an instance of alienation that will reappear in his critique
of Young Hegelianism. However, for the moment, we will take a step back from
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, to discuss Marx’s Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question.

Political
alienation

Given Marx’s commitment
to radical democracy, notwithstanding his debt to Hegel, he necessarily ran up
against the latter’s conservatism. This was clearly expressed in Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right, which was a rationalisation of the Prussian model of
constitutional absolutism.Hegel’s
essential mistake in this work, Marx contends, is an extension and a
magnification of his previous philosophy. If, in The Phenomenology of Spirit,
Hegel captures something of real human relationships, despite its speculative-idealist
underpinning, Hegel does not even manage this in The Philosophy of Right.
This is because, in addition to retaining the abstract speculative foundation,
it attempts to deduce politics from philosophy. It regards the world upside
down. So, Marx writes:

The Idea is given the
status of a subject, and the actual relationship of family and civil society to
the state is conceived to be its inner imaginary activity. Family and civil
society are the presuppositions of the state; they are the really active
things; but in speculative philosophy it is reversed. But if the Idea is made subject,
then the real subjects -- civil society, family, circumstances, caprice, etc.
-- become unreal, and take on the different meaning of objective moments of the
Idea.[19]

So, on this basis, Marx accuses
Hegel of having written a philosophical apology for a deeply undemocratic,
anti-human politics. Just as Marx views Hegel’s substitution of Spirit for
humanity as a philosophical expression of human alienation, Marx argued that
the State’s power and agency could only come about as a result of the political
disempowerment and atomisation of humanity. So we see the first major extension of the
concept of alienation -- into politics.

The central
contradiction of modern politics, in Marx’s view, is the separation between the
state and civil society. In this relationship, the state – comprised of
multiple elements – is produced by civil society, but appears as the true
expression of universalism, the repository of morality, truth, justice and so
on, in comparison to the ‘crass materialism’ of civil society. The state is
invested with human values, while the sphere of human activity – civil society
– is subordinated. Hegel, Marx contends, perceives the contradiction between
civil society and the state, but hypostatises or naturalises it; he accepts the
state as the bearer of the universal interest. He sees the bureaucracy as the
universal class; as the bearer of “knowing spirit”.[20] Hegel, too dialectical to
allow a contradiction to go unresolved but not humanist enough to understand
its genuine resolution or overcoming, has civil society – which is unofficial
and private – obtain entry into the universal, the state via the Estates (here
Marx refers to a form of delegated representation such as that which led the
Great French Revolution of 1789), which are formalised as a legislature that is
moderated and restricted by the sovereign, who represents the general agency,
or general decision making.[21] Marx is flatly appalled
by all of this.[22]

To begin with, the
bureaucracy is founded on the principle of general ignorance; it only exists as
a result of the exclusion from power and knowledge of the mass. Marx writes:

The bureaucracy is a
circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.
The highest point entrusts the understanding of particulars to the lower
echelons, whereas these, on the other hand, credit the highest with an
understanding in regard to the universal; and thus they deceive one another…
The general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved
inwardly by means of the hierarchy and externally as a closed corporation. To
make public the mind and the disposition of the state appears therefore to the
bureaucracy as a betrayal of its mystery. Accordingly authority is the principle
of its knowledge and being, and the deification of authority is its mentality.[23]

Marx scorns Hegel’s
insistence that bureaucratic impartiality is guaranteed by meritocratic
admission and the detachment of bureaucratic office from personal property; behind
the bureaucracy’s aloofness lies “crass materialism”. “As far as the individual
bureaucrat is concerned, the end of the state becomes his private end: a
pursuit of higher posts, the building of a career. In the first place, he
considers real life to be purely material, for the spirit of this life has its
separate existence in the bureaucracy”.[24] So, the bureaucracy finds
its real life expression in the state and has an interest in colonising civil
society with its logic. Marx labels this “bureaucratic Jesuitism”; the bureaucrats
regard humans only formally, only in the abstract, as a means, while regarding
themselves as the active elements in society.[25] Corporations (meant not
in the commercial sense, but in the sense of civil-associations) must satisfy
the bureaucracy to obtain recognition, and so the spirit of bureaucracy
colonises civil society.[26] This leads to the next
point: insofar as civil society obtains representation in the state, via the
Estates, this too is based on the atomised, formal logic of the state. In other
words, the preservation of the state’s universality depends on the
fragmentation and denial of the universality of the mass of humanity. So, the Estates
are reduced to a formal expression – in them, the will of the people is only
formally recognised:

… for the Estates as an
element of the legislative power have precisely the character of rendering the
unofficial class, civil society, non-existent. The separation of civil society
and the political state appears necessarily to be a separation of the political
citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society, i.e., from his own
actual, empirical reality; for as a state-idealist he is a being who is
completely other, distinct, different from and opposed to his own actuality.[27]

And this, therefore,
brings us to the expression of political alienation for the individual: humans
are divided between the empirical, real, active humans of civil society and the
citizen, who is the political man, cut off from real-life activity. This is a
specifically modern condition: under feudalism, human activity was immediately
political and had no universal status. That is to say, different castes and
strata in society obtained a political existence, including rights, privileges
and duties, on the basis of their life activity – say, as nobility, artisans,
peasants and so on. Modernity replaces this with abstract equality and with it
the diremption between empirical, qualitatively different humans and citizens,
the abstractly equal bearers of rights.[28] This is, of course, the
foundation of the Marxist critique of the political and legal forms of the
enlightenment. But Marx is clear: this is not a product of a constitution:
“Just as it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so
it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which creates
the constitution”.[29] Rather, the secret to this
political alienation is to be found in civil society itself, in the social
institution of private property. Marx makes this clear via a deconstruction of
what was then the most radical modern political constitution, that of 1793:

The right of man to
private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to
dispose of it at one’s discretion without regard to other men, independently of
society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its
application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other
men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. …None of the so-called rights of man,
therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society –
that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private
interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights
of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary,
species-like itself, society, appears as a framework external to the
individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond
holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the
preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.[30]

So, the state is a
hypostatisation of this atomistic condition of man. Just as a business contract
is not the reconciliation of two hostile commercial parties but a treaty for
the temporary cessation of mutual hostility, the state, also in its ideal
existence, is a necessary institution of a society predicated on unlimited
egotism and accumulation.[31] And given that man is
reduced to mutual hostility in civil society and is, therefore, incapable of
finding universal human solidarity there, man vests the state with
universality. And so, having discovered the secret of political alienation in
the self-constitution of civil society, based as it is on private property and
atomised self-interest, Marx re-orients towards a critique of political
economy. Finally, however, it is worth noting a few themes related to the
concept of alienation that continue and develop through Marx’s early writing:
alienation is an atomized, egotistical state. It is also a state in which
humanity’s essence, our universal quality, our species being, expressed
qualitatively through our products (be these prosaic objects, relationships or
values), is removed from humanity and invested in an other that is apparently
external to us. In turn, this quantifies and reduces humanity to a hollow
abstraction. The only universalism we can obtain under these conditions is the
flat, formal, alienated, legal equality of humans who treat each other as
means. These themes will be elaborated
upon, concretised and explained in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844.

The
economic production of alienation

In his preface to The
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx states his rationale for
delving into political economy. He had intended to write a political work, on
the basis of his critique of Hegel, but in order to do this without arbitrary
systematisation, it was necessary to situate it in terms of the proper core of
the modern constitution, political economy.[32] Once more, he
demonstrated his Hegelian inheritance by insisting on an immanent critique. In
his words, he “Proceeded from the premises of political economy”.[33] Hence terms that would
become crucial to Marx’s critique of political economy are appropriated and
understood in their interaction: wages, labour, capital, exchange value and
competition are all discussed in order to give rise to a crucial result. The
worker is made a commodity, to be exchanged according to its exchange value.
Yet this specific commodity – labour – is responsible for the profits of
capital, without which capital could not exist.[34] Indeed, he is at pains to
stress labour and capital exist in inverse proportions; the enrichment of
capital is the immiseration of labour.[35] So Marx writes: “the
wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude
of his production … The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he
produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker
becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates”.[36]Marx is able to argue that labour is
therefore the essence of capital. It creates capital which in turn is nought
but dead labour presiding over living. This represents a further extension and
modification of the concept of alienation and has disastrous consequences for
the worker who is produced, in this process, as an alienated labourer. Marx
writes:

The devaluation of the
world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of
things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker
as a commodity -- and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in
general … This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces -- labor's
product -- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the
producer. … Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears
as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object
and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[37]

This is crucial as it is
the foundation of Marx’s entire social ontology of capitalism. Indeed, the rest
of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 can be seen as an
elaboration on the thesis that alienated labour is world-producing, in the
social-ontological sense.

How is this the case?
First, alienated labour, because it produces an object – capital – which is
estranged from labour, is an activity that produces alienation:“But the estrangement is manifested not only
in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity,
itself ... If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must
be active alienation”[38] Second, nature exists for
us as a result of labour – our entire interaction with nature is conditioned by
our conscious labour on it. Thus Marx terms nature our “inorganic body”.[39] Our continuous
interaction with this inorganic body is the indispensable condition for life,
and yet we work on nature in a way that is divorced from our control. While
this has important connotations for the way modern civilisation has
instrumentalised nature, Marx does not dwell on this. Rather, he argues that it
is our conscious interaction with nature that produces human species-being as a
universal quality, one distinct from animals. This is, in other words, how we
produce both ourselves and the objective world as it exists for us. He writes:

The animal is
immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it …
Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his
consciousness. He has conscious life activity … It is just in his work upon the
objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a
species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this
production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is,
therefore, the objectification of man's species-life: for he duplicates himself
not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality,
and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.[40]

This begins to give us a
sense of the importance of labour and alienated labour for Marx. Our activity
creates every object which populates our world, including us, social objects,
natural objects and so on. Marx is, therefore, a profoundly anti-naturalistic
and anti-positivistic thinker. In this he remains deeply loyal to Hegel.[41] Indeed, it could be
argued that this puts Marx on a similar footing to a theorist like Castoriadis,
for whom imaginative activity plays the role of creating a social institution
whose signifiers fluidly organise literally everything, from the most basic
logical activity, to the activity of self-reflexivity.[42] Moreover, this allows us
to redefine “material reality” and materialism. Marx makes this clear in
numbers I and V of his famous Theses on Feuerbach:

The chief defect of all
hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing,
reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object
or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity,
practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to
materialism, the active side was
developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real,
sensuous activity as such … Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking,
wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical,
human-sensuous activity.[43]

Marx adds detail to this
later in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He argues
that even our senses are constructed through labour:

For not only the five
senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love,
etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by
virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses
is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense
caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving
man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract
existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it
would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of
animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest
play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty
and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense.[44]

This clarified, it is
finally possible to turn to the consequences of the fact that our sensuous
human activity is conducted under the condition of alienation. First,
alienation produces a debased human subject. The worker is reduced to an animal
existence, feeling at home only outside of work and in the fulfilment of the
functions of eating, sleeping and reproducing.[45] Second, while under the
compulsion of accumulation, a new and dazzling array of needs is created, ever greater
numbers of humans are denied satisfaction of these needs.[46] And insofar as we may
satisfy the needs generated by capitalism, it is via the medium of money which
becomes the alienated object par excellence. Indeed, anticipating the
work of Simmel and Lukács, Marx’s discussion of money explains its vast and
contradictory power in capitalist society:

If money is the bond
binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and
man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties?
Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? … it [money]
converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them
from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual
existence – from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In
effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power … As money is not
exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any
particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and
nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange
every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is
the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.[47]

This raises a final
point about Marx’s theory of alienation: it allows him to understand the
dynamism and agency of social institutions like capital, the market, money and
so on. These institutions are, at their core, relationships. But they are
relationships produced under alienated conditions, and as such, while humans
still make history, they do so under burden of a vast world of dead, estranged
human labour which appears to determine events. This philosophical
underpinning is crucial, amongst other things, for Marx’s theory of economic
crisis.

Overcoming
alienation

Marx’s
theory of alienation already implies a non-alienated condition that is the
overcoming of alienation. Indeed, the overcoming of alienation – a powerful
humanist ethical impulse – can be seen as Marx’s main motivator. Of course, he
was not the only thinker seeking to overcome the human degradation of capitalism.
So, Marx carried his search for emancipation out via a critique of other
thinkers. Politically, this meant an engagement that was both friendly and
critical, with what he would term Utopian Socialism.[48] Economically, as has been
mentioned, this meant a critique of political economy. Philosophically, this
meant a sharp break with the Young Hegelian movement. His sharpest words – and
there are many of them – were reserved for these radical philosophers. They
bear the full brunt of the extensive criticism he develops in The Holy
Family and The German Ideology.

His
explicit starting point is not to counterpose his materialism with their
idealism. Rather, he regularly and persistently opposed their speculative
idealism to his own humanism.[49] As we have seen, his
philosophy posits humans as the creators of their world, of materiality and of
meaning. This view effectively renders the antinomy between materialism and
idealism void; Marx’s materialism is an active materialism that regards human subjectivity
– labour – as not just the product of but also the creator of its world. This
view directly informs his main attack on “Critical Criticism” (as Marx termed
the Young Hegelian project); he sees in the Young Hegelian philosophy the
highest theoretical expression of
alienation. Philosophy, in Marx’s critique, is furthest from life, and produces
only abstractions – still, dead, schematic reproductions of life.[50] This critique is close to
what Castoriadis would describe as heteronomy; that is, deriving human
institutions and relations from a force outside humanity – be it God, Reason,
History or whatever.[51] Indeed, Marx charges
Hegel with epitomising this philosophical disposition, which results in elitism:

Hegel's conception of
history assumes an Abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a way
that mankind is a mere mass bearing it with a varying degree of consciousness
or unconsciousness. Within empiric, exoteric history he therefore has a
speculative, esoteric history develop. The history of mankind becomes the
history of the abstract spirit of mankind, a spirit beyond all man … If the
activity of real mankind is nothing but the activity of a mass of human
individuals then abstract generality, Reason, the Spirit must contrariwise have
an abstract expression restricted to a few individuals. It then depends on the
situation and imaginative power of each individual whether he will pass for a
representative of that “spirit”.[52]

This,
Marx contends, has conservative consequences:

As Hegel here puts
self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears
only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere
determination of self-consciousness is a “pure category”, a mere “thought”
which I can consequently also abolish in ‘pure’ thought and overcome through
pure thought. In Hegel's Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective
bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as
they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative
philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the
sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a “thing of thought”, a
mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its
opponent, which has become ethereal, in the “ether of pure thought”.[53]

In
The German Ideology, Marx argues that this abstract, ideological view of
the world is born of alienation. Most importantly, he extends the concept back
into history, to human society’s first premise, the production and satisfaction
of human needs.[54]
So, labour creates language, culture and society. And as it satisfies needs, it
creates new, more advanced ones, which demand a sophistication of the labour
process – the creation of a division of labour.[55] This division of labour
and the attendant relationships of production, confront new generations as a
natural fact and the product of an external will. So we see the first
historical development of alienation. Moreover, this division of labour implies
a division into classes, exploiter and exploited, and between manual and
intellectual labour. Thus ideology -- which is consciousness divorced from its
human origin and therefore false and one-sided -- is born. Alienation under
generalised commodity production is simply the purest historical instance of
this phenomenon and therefore the one that allows us to understand
retrospectively its genesis. This allows Marx to positively transcend the Young
Hegelians: “Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive
science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical
process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real
knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an
independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence”.[56]

Yet
if social relations become “naturalised” and take on the solidity of a
materially experienced reality, what tendency or force can overcome alienation?
Marx’s answer is that the dynamic of alienation itself achieves this. Precisely
because productive forces appear, and for all intents and purposes are
beyond our control, they determine our lives in a chaotic way. Ultimately, this
provides – as mentioned above – a theoretical basis for a theory of crisis. The
reproduction of society is organised pre-reflexively and therefore cannot
sustain indefinite expansion. The specific dynamics of this crisis are the
object of Marx’s critique of political economy. For now, what matters is his
view that: “Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our
view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of
intercourse”.[57]
This, he says, means that despite appearing more free than ever in capitalist
society, we are more than ever before subjected to the “violence of things”.[58] Our overcoming of this
state can only be achieved by the substitution of a community for egotistical
humanity.[59]
And this, in his view, is the essential task of the proletariat, the class with
“radical chains”, for whom alienation is the total loss of self and whose
life’s activity is the production of alienation.[60] The proletariat, in
forming itself as a class, in emancipating labour, necessarily asserts the essence
of humanity. This, Marx makes clear, means a revolutionary overcoming of political
alienation, the overcoming of the antagonism at the heart of civil society:

The condition for the
emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the
condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was
the abolition of all estates and all orders. The working class, in the course
of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association
which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more
political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the
official expression of antagonism in civil society.[61]

So
the key to the abolition of alienation is to overcome the contradiction on
which it is premised; not to reconcile either side of the contradiction but to
make this contradiction impossible. On the level of politics, in On the
Jewish Question Marx writes:

Only
when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and
as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life,
in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has
recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently,
no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power,
only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.[62]

And,
more essentially, economically, the overcoming of alienation is the creation of
a society whose relationships are socially, reflexively organised, so that
labour is not commodified and therefore, not directed towards an external,
alienated end. This is, of course, Communism. He writes:

Communism as the positive
transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as
the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore
as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a
return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous
development. … It is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and
nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife … between
objectification and self-confirmation … between the individual and the species.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this
solution.[63]

Conclusion

One could rather
obviously say that in 1844, Marx was overly optimistic about the immediate
prospects for a communist revolution. He would later spend years trying to
understand how capitalism could reproduce itself economically. Moreover, he
would develop his views on politics based on his experience in, and study of,
revolutionary movements. Hence, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and
The Civil War in France are key texts to understanding Marx’s developed
political theory. This said, as this essay has sought to illustrate the
centrality of alienation to Marx’s early work, these issues are not relevant.
Similarly, whether or not Marx ever broke with his earlier dialectical-humanist
social ontology is also not in question. Rather, this essay has sought to
establish seven interrelated points.

Firstly, Marx’s theory
of alienation is a humanist reworking of a concept that already exists in
Hegel, most clearly in The Phenomenology of Spirit. In place of Spirit,
Marx nominates humanity. And instead of undertaking a conceptual/philosophical
journey, Marx argues that humanity traverses its real world, of which philosophy
is only one side. This already pushes towards the idea of labour as
world-creating. Secondly, Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political views is
premised on a similar approach: instead of seeing the state as the realisation
of Spirit, he sees it as a political embodiment of alienated and fragmented
humanity. The state can only exist as the hypostatisation of the contradiction
in civil society, which is premised on ruthless egotism. Therefore, Marx’s
critique of politics leads him to a critique of political economy. This helps
him clarify his view that alienated, commodified labour is the creator of
society and the totality of social institutions that confront us, including
capital, wages and so on. This posits a deep and radical social ontology where
all the aspects of human existence, even down to our sense-perception, are
created by social relations, albeit in a way that debases humanity and divorces
it from its own products. Marx’s search for an agency that can overcome
alienation leads to the next two points. First of these is his critique of
philosophy as an instance on alienation. It is a fetishisation of concepts that
are always human, but which appear independent of humanity. Second of these is his
examination of history. He posits alienation as a trans-historical relationship
which reaches its highest form under capitalism. This is not to pose a teleology;
rather it is to posit the progressive, immanent self-definition of humanity
through our own activity. Finally, from this, Marx attempts to define how
humanity may refigure itself from within an alienated society – primarily via
the breakdown in the reproduction of society and by the assertion of a new,
collective humanity in the form of the proletarian movement. And so, for Marx,
the revolutionary emancipation of labour is the overcoming of alienation.

Why is all this
significant? A full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this essay. But
suffice it to say, this side of Marx is one that was lost for two generations.
It is, however, a side of Marx that has a great deal in common with Georg
Lukács who in the 1920s theorised a very similar social ontology. This body of
work proved enormously rich, and importantly, it re-asserted the radical
humanism of Marxism. This would become a key theme in 20th-century
Western Marxism and critical theory. So, in a world still dominated by the
inhuman logic of capital, this side of Marx should be re-asserted as a starting
point for emancipatory social and political theory.

Notes

[3] This is to say,
simultaneously, that the conditions which give rise to philosophy as such must
be abolished, and that a philosophical understanding of those conditions is a
necessary component of this. Ibid, pp. 43 & 75.

[5] For this reason,
this essay is limited to a discussion of the above texts and excludes works published
after 1847. It has been contended, most famously by Louis Althusser, that Marx
broke sharply with his earlier views. Whether or not this is the case is
outside the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that no claim is made here
regarding the continuity or otherwise of the theory of alienation in Marx’s
later work. Similarly, Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx’s doctoral
dissertation and a few other minor works, although they are from his early
period, have been excluded as they do not bear directly on the subject matter.

At
this stage, it is necessary to apologise to the reader. Discussing Hegel is
next to impossible without resort to at least some of the terminology he
employs. Key terms in the Hegelian system tend to be capitalised. I have
attempted to define these succinctly where their definition isn’t at least
somewhat self-evident. Replicating the often intricate detail of Hegel’s
writing is not the point; rather a faithful account of the main movement in
Hegel is what is aimed at.

[7] The Understanding is
nature understood, not just in itself, but also for us and therefore, for
itself. This is to say, by traversing Sense-Certainty, Perception and Force and
the Understanding, Consciousness realises that it is simultaneously the creator
and product of nature, and is nature (or Being, or Substance) made
self-conscious. Otherness, the external world, is not denied, but is made a
moment of self-consciousness. G.F.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
§166.

[10] This dialectic is
often assumed to be of central importance for Marxism on account of it
detailing a highly metaphorical sort of class struggle. Yet Chris Arthur has
convincingly demonstrated that Marx did not significantly draw upon it. After
all, at the end of the dialectic of Lordship and Bondage, Hegel quite
explicitly discards work (which can easily be read as labour) as a principle
upon which a universal understanding can be built. Chris Arthur, “Hegel’s
Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology”, New Left Review, no. 142,
Nov-Dec, 1983.

[22] Of course, Marx’s Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is rich in detail and polemical flare.
Therefore, only a few points that Marx raises that best illustrate his
understanding of political alienation will be considered here.

[28] This establishes a
clear parallel between Marx and the Foucault of Discipline and Punish
who argued for the deep penetration of this quantitative logic to the criminal
justice and education systems.

[31] Ibid, pp. 11 & 12. Marx extends
this critique in The Holy Family, writing: "The modern ‘public
system,’ the developed modern state, is not based, as Criticism thinks, on a
society of privileges, but on a society in which privileges are abolished and
dissolved; on developed civil society based on the vital elements which were
still politically fettered in the privilege system and have been set free. Here
‘no privileged exclusivity’ stands opposed either to any other exclusivity or
to the public system. Free industry and free trade abolish privileged
exclusivity and thereby the struggle between the privileged exclusivities. In
its place they set man free from privilege — which isolates from the social
whole but at the same time joins in a narrower exclusivity — man, no longer
bound to other men even by the semblance of common ties. Thus they produce the
universal struggle of man against man, individual against individual. In the
same way civil society as a whole is this war among themselves of all those
individuals no longer isolated from the others by anything else but their
individuality, and the universal uncurbed movement of the elementary forces of
life freed from the fetters of privilege. The contradiction between the
democratic representative state and civil society is the perfection of the
classic contradiction between public commonwealth and slavedom. In the modern
world each one is at the same time a member of slavedom and of the public
commonwealth. Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest
freedom because it is in appearance the perfect independence of the individual.
Indeed, the individual considers as his own freedom the movement, no longer
curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man, the movement of his alienated
life elements, like property, industry, religion, etc.; in reality, this is the
perfection of his slavery and his inhumanity. Right has here taken the place of
privilege."
Karl Marx, The Holy Family, p. 156.

[35] It is important to
note that Marx would later clarify his theory to distinguish more precisely
between price and value. This is important to note because Marx’s developed
critique of political economy is not a theory of perpetually declining living
standards – which is the impression one would be left with on the basis of the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Indeed, in developed economies where
labour sets into motion vast accumulations of capital, the relative proportion
of value allotted back to labour in the form of wages is a tiny fraction of the
overall value it produces. This, however, bears little on the price that the
worker receives in exchange for his or her labour time and the price of
commodities necessary for sustenance. So, a skilled worker in the first world
may enjoy a relatively high living standard while technically being more
exploited than an unskilled worker in the third world.

[37] Ibid. It is, however, important to
make one brief note: Marx’s discovery here is of the conceptual genesis
of capitalism, not its historical genesis. The historical picture is
distorted as labour, in its essential form, is only a product of developed
capitalism; indeed, the commodity relationship, itself the product of a
historical development, precedes labour, in its pure form. Hence, we can
say of pre-capitalist societies that labour as we understand it today
produced the wealth of those societies, albeit not in a way that produced the
category of labour. The specific categories under which production occurred
in pre-capitalist society is a matter for historical anthropology. Marx
explains this point, writing: “Private property is thus the product, the
result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation
of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property thus results by
analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of
estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man. True, it is as a result
of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of
alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of
this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the
reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the
gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man's intellectual
confusion.Later this relationship
becomes reciprocal.Only at the
culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret,
appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated
labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself,
the realization of this alienation." Ibid, p. 32.

[41] Incidentally, this
also clarifies Marx’s relationship to Hegel. Being (nature) is made for itself
and for us as consciousness intellectually or philosophically wins its
independence from it, via dialectical interrogation. So it is still basically a
contemplative relationship. Marx does not deny the theoretical aspect of this
process but does away with its one-sidedness. Labour is a holistic concept of
human activity, in which theory and practice are not divorced.

[44] Karl Marx, The
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 41.
Marx expands on this extremely important idea, derived from his critique of
Feuerbach in The German Ideology: “He [Feuerbach] does not see how the
sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity,
remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of
society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result
of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the
shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse,
modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of
the simplest ‘sensuous certainty’ are only given him through social
development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost
all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted
by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite
society in a definite age it has become ‘sensuous certainty’ for Feuerbach …
Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he
mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and
chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even
this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only
through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is
this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production,
the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it
interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change
in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and
his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in
all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has
no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca; but
this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be
distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human
history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature
which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian
coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for
Feuerbach.”
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, pp. 19 & 20.

[50] In The Holy
Family, this critique is often taken to hilarious and bizarre extremes –
for example, Marx spends five pages developing a parody of the Hegelian
speculative method as applied to fruit. Apples, pears, almonds and so on, Marx
declares, are only appearances of the Concept of “the Fruit”. Fruit – the
Universal – only obtains its actuality via instantiation in particular fruits. Thus
Fruit contains a subjective and objective moment; the self-activity of Fruit produces
concrete fruits as vanishing moments of itself. This motion taken in its unity
is “Absolute Fruit”. Unfortunately for us all, most greengrocers are not versed
in Hegelian speculative idealism, and do not sell Absolute Fruit. Ibid, pp. 78-83.

[53] He continues: “…
[therefore] the Critical Critic -- the theologian ex professo -- cannot
hit upon the thought that there is a world in which consciousness and being are
distinct; a world which continues to exist when I do away with its existence in
thought ... That is why Criticism is so vexed with practice when it wishes to
be something distinct from theory, and with theory when it wishes to be
something else than the dissolution of a definite category in the 'boundless
generality of self-consciousness.’” Ibid, pp. 253 & 254.